Retrovision II.

05Oct09

He never really received the attention he deserved – perhaps because his character and practice made him difficult to pigeonhole – and so it seemed important to provide an opportunity to reflect on the sheer depth and quality of his ideas. ( … ) Like Samuel Beckett or Bruce Nauman, his use of repetition, and the loop, becomes a metaphor for the absurdity of life itself: we are born, we wake up, we go to sleep and inevitably we die.
Times Online, Tom Trevor, director of Arnolfini

You do know how it is when something, the second you see it, just sits in your mind forever. I was browsing the other day through some old stuff I managed to accumulate through years, paper stuff that is. And I hit a treasure. An old color printer print. Imprinted in my mind.

It is this image.

It is Angus Fairhurst’s print titled “Pieta”.
Angus Fairhurst is fabulous and maybe the most gifted artist of Young British Artists generation. As we speak, there is an exhibition ‘Art in a Material World’ opened last Thursday in Tate Modern, where the most acclaimed works of the YBA movement are presented. And in the meantime, when Richard Prince’s “Spiritual America” is censored again and banned from that same exhibition, I am wondering what is going on now with Angus. What is he doing?

Leafing through internet I found out he is not around anymore. He died last spring. Allegedly he drove off just after the celebrating dinner party of the opening of his solo exhibition, wandered into the woods and hanged himself.

Richard Prince steels a photograph, which is of pedophile and pornographic nature, blows it up and gets attention. When the art world is busy with that ephemera, the real talent wanders into the woods.